The Opportunity for Voice and Video Convergence

This blog post is an excerpt from our recent report with Motorola, Federal Law Enforcement: Enhanced Intelligence and Faster Decisions. To read the rest of the report, head here.

In any operating environment, the ability to distill information in real time and communicate clearly across multiple workflows is key to mission success. Government agencies have made strides enabling voice interoperability across teams, yet true interoperability requires more.

True interoperability is about realizing entirely new ways of connecting critical resources that deliver unprecedented capabilities to transform federal law enforcement operations. And it’s about giving the command structure the tools to filter information, incorporate new information and assign it to the appropriate user.

From crime reports to social media to surveillance cameras, data is proliferating rapidly. Its potential to connect and inform operating decisions makes it law enforcement’s greatest untapped resource. Yet without a flexible and secure platform to unify voice, video and other data formats, the data is just noise and agencies cannot effectively transform it into actionable intelligence.

The technology does exist today to converge voice, video and data information onto a common platform, and to apply law enforcement-oriented analytics to produce greater intelligence and faster decisions. But the challenge for many government organizations is how to evolve enterprise and field infrastructure so that it scales and supports next-generation capabilities.

The human capital challenge is how to structure, staff and train operation center personnel to support converged voice and mid-incident response capabilities. At each step of this process, you should consider the impact of modernization, whether through technology insertion, reorganization or other changes, on individuals’ roles – what training, skill sets and/or new hires will be needed, and whether to purchase or to use a services model (such as software-as-a-service).